Fell back into Starcraft 2 after a year or so's break. It's like playing it again for the first time, since my skills have atrophied back to zero and Blizzard just launched a new version of Battle.net that chews all its cache files and generally makes it take four hours to get a game started.Still, I can feel the addiction working its way through my veins.

Re: trolls - I play League of Legends and that game had a HUGE issue with trolls. Part of the problem is that it's Free-to-Play so people didn't really feel like they had to worry about things like not being a giant, festering cockwart to other people; if one account got banned they'd just make another. Then Riot Games instituted a system where people could report people for being good, emphasizing niceness, teamwork, being an "honorable" opponent, and it greatly reduced the number of assclown incidents. There's no real reward for not being a dick, other than a ribbon that shows up on your character portrait, but it was enough.

Well, now I feel silly for pre-ordering SimCity, because Origin is crashing worse than Steam did when The Orange Box came out. And once the game is installed I'm sure it'll be Diablo III all over again, just like I figured after the closed beta and everybody else has been predicting for months.

After getting thoroughly sidetracked by everything I put a couple hours into Ni no Kuni again yesterday. I don't think I'll be letting myself get distracted again for a while. I was only in the second town (desert area) when I got distracted from it, and the game really starts opening up from there.

It's a game where I constantly have the camera at ground level, slightly tilted up, because everything is so pretty and I don't want to miss a single detail. :)

InvincibleM: Don't be too proud to consult online upgrade guides. Otherwise you may be spending hours grinding for enough souls to upgrade a weapon that turns out to have the wrong stat combination for you.

Or... Okay, this is NOT A SPOILER. Though I guess you can stop reading if you really want to figure out every single system in the game for yourself.

Basically, look at the bonus stats a weapon gives you. The heavier weapons are usually based around Strength bonuses, and the faster weapons are usually based around Dexterity bonuses. In either case, you have the opportunity to upgrade them to a Magic or Divine weapon, which scales based on your Intelligence and Faith stats respectively. So even if you've only sunk enough Str/Dex points to simply be able to use a certain weapon, upgrading them to Magic/Divine allows you to do damage based on the same stat that works your spells or miracles.

And if you make (or get) a Lightning or Fire weapon, your stats don't matter for that weapon (except for some special ones) unless you don't have enough of the other stats to be able to use that weapon.

Last bit of spoiler-free advice: Slabs are limited. If you're gonna use a slab of any kind, be VERY SURE that you want to use it.

NON-SPOILERS END.

Of course, none of this will help you through good ol' Sen's. God. Now I want Dark Souls 2 to come out faster. I just know both Souls games too well to get nervous in'em.

In other old-news, I gave up on Tomba. It's a cult classic PS1 game that hates your guts more than either Souls game ever did. With the Souls games, most of the time simply being cautious will get you by. Not so in Tomba.

Three examples. I'd just spent my last extra life on a boss in a jungle area. Now, the game has absolutely no reason whatsoever to be using a lives system. Because outside of bosses, what'll happen when you lose your last life is that you get sent back to the start screen, and you have to load the last save... And the save points are something like a couple of minutes apart.However, loading the save point loads the save point with as many lives as you had there, and lives are precious rare. So for a lot of my run, I've been at zero lives. Meaning every single life lost means loading the save again.Which gets annoying when you're put in a cave with lots of sudden-death falls, where enemies suddenly spawn Ghosts 'n Goblins style in the middle of the screen, and your main mode of transportation is an unreliable grapple hook. Yeah.Got past that area. Went into a jungle. Was on my last life again after a boss. Figured I'd peek into this cage thingy on the way back to the save point.Cage closed behind me. Which killed me. Game over. Had to re-do boss.Right after THAT, I was sent on a fetch quest so a monkey would teach me how to swim. Got that to the monkey, who told me to jump into the water. Did so, which triggered a tutorial on how to swim. And at that point I could apparently swim.Out of the tutorial, I jumped back into the water. Which instantly killed me.Consulted a FAQ. Turns out this one fire item I was wearing made it impossible for me to swim. Gee, thanks for telling me, game.

Tomba is the kind of game I'd struggle with and grow to love back in my younger days, when I couldn't afford more than a couple of games every six months. I can really see why people look back on it fondly. As it is, I enjoy the enjoyable bits, but it's got such a huge amount of old-school-in-a-bad-way bits that I just don't have the patience. And I'm someone who's spent about 50 hours on Demon's Souls and more than a hundred hours on Dark Souls.

Also got Bit.Trip.Saga for my 3DS. I've been curious about the Bit.Trip games since they started coming out, and they ARE interesting. Not getting them on the Wii was a good thing, though... These are more portable timekillers than anything else.

FINALLY got another xbox after a two year hiatus. I missed a LOT. Been playing Assassain's Creed 3. Got to NY and I'm bored with it. It's not very fun when you become an unstoppable juggernaut.

So I started Skyrim. WOW! Beautiful, and much like one of my favorites: Fallout 3. I assumed as much with a Bethesda game. Now I want to play Fallout 3 again. I just wish V.A.T.S. existed in real life. Arguments would be SO much easier.

I also got the Red Dead Game of the Year edition. Eager to play the Undead Nightmare.

Having played more Tomb Raider today it is AMAZING!!! so far. There has yet to be anything that I would have changed it. Other than the text on the upgrade screen being a bit blurry and the implication that I won't be able to dual wield the original pistols. The ones from the Crystal Dynamics just don't look right to me. Especially enjoying playing as a character who isn't a super soldier with one of three different haircuts.

Just to be clear, it isn't another Planescape game. It's a "Torment" game, which they are using as short hand for "Planescape: Torment was an awesome game, and we have a lot of the right people on hand to make a similar game." But it isn't actually set in Planescape, nor does it have any of the same characters or any crossover story elements. It's being set in the Numenera setting, a kickstarter which I also backed and am eagerly awaiting my rulebooks for.